Trayvon Martin at 16 years old. (Martin Family photo via The Associated Press)

People! Listen, and listen closely. The photo you’re still passing around via e-mail is not that of Trayvon Martin. Not even close. The man in that photo is a rapper named Game. The picture was used in a May 6, 2010 story for XXL magazine. Game was 31 years old at the time.

In the last 24 hours, a friend and a reader separately forwarded me the e-mail making the rounds. “Recognize this guy? I didn’t,” the text reads, “[W]hy would the media show us a picture of a little boy instead of a current picture?????” The people who persist in peddling the Game picture as Trayvon are despicable.

They say the smiling Trayvon in the Hollister t-shirt is 12 years old. And they complain that the media are guilty of a liberal bias for showing it rather that what they think is a more up-to-date image. I asked Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump about this in February. Trayvon was 16 when that photo was taken in August 2011. If folks want a more current picture before the teenager was killed by a single shot to the heart they ought to look at the one of him on a horse. It was taken about a week before he was killed.

For those despicable people who demand something even more concrete, I suggest they examine Trayvon’s publicly available autopsy. In it, the medical examiner notes that the slain teenager stood 5’11” tall, not 6’2” as so many believe. More importantly, the medical examiner documents that Trayvon only had a tattoo on his right arm and another on his left wrist.

Some photos have turned out to be real. But to insist that the ink-covered Game is really Trayvon, to blame “the liberal agenda” for not being suckered into peddling falsehoods is to willfully ignore facts. If you get an e-mail with the subject “Very interesting . . . Never trust the new media,” just hit delete.

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Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.